I recently found an occupation fact for an individual that had a date, place, place details, but the description field was blank. Normally, I use the place details to identify the company, trade, or physcial place (ie high school) where the person worked. THe occupation I record in the description field.

Now, a couple of years ago, I migraged from a defunct genealogy program to RM, and once in an while I find things that didn't transfer. Not sure if this person's occupatin didn't tranfer or if it was operator error and I didn't type it in.

Got me to wondering if there were others with the occupation not listed in the description field. I use the Named Grouped Feature constantly for doing cleanups and locating groups of people I need to make changes to. So I though I would just do a search for the occupation fact where the description field was blank.

Problem is, description is not a choice in the drop down list. We have place, place details, value, note, source among others, but not description. I could have sworn this was there before, but maybe not.

Is there a technical reason in the database structure that prevents us from being able to search facts on the description field?

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions. While the best answer for me is to have an option to set RM to use only the full citation in the long term, there may be some short term workaround in your suggestions.

Is there anyway I can force RM 5 to use only the full (long) source citation in a narrative report? The way RM is using the short note on a second reference is giving me quite a few problems.

1) I generally export my narratives to word for additional editing. RM use the long footnote in the first instance, and the short note subsequent references. When I move text around, I have ended up in some cases where the short not now preceeds the full citation note, so it is a bit meaningless.

2) With some source types, such as newspaper online images, here is the problem tat occurs (not well though out source types by the way). Let's say I have two newspapers, Paper 1 and Paper 2. And in one report I have four obituaries, two from Paper 1 and two from Paper 2.

Person 1 has an obituary in Paper 1, and the footnote has the entire full citation.
Person 2 has an obituary in Paper 2, and the footnote has the entire full citation.
Person 3 has an obituary in Paper 1, and all I get is "Obituary", p. 3.
Person 4 has an obituary in Paper 2, and all Ig et is "Obituary", p. 5.

I have no way to know what paper person 3 and 4's obituaries came from. THe short note option only gives the article title and the page number.

I have just used obituaries as an exmple. Sometimes the second reference is some other news story with a title. But you have no indication what paper it is from. Again, poor source design. I would have expected the built in sources to be better though out.

I would be happy with just a switch to tell RM to not use the short note option.